A man wearing a mask shaped like an old TV set spent a night leaving old TV sets on the porches of over 50 homes in Virginia this past weekend, and no one has any idea why.

In what has been described as a real-life episode of The Twilight Zone, a mysterious character wearing a fake TV set on his head spent a night carefully placing over 50 old TV sets on the porches of dozens of houses in Henrico County, Virginia. When residents woke up on Sunday they just found the bizarre gifts in front of their front doors and started looking around for whoever left it. Then they started calling police to report the unusual gifts. As of yet, no one knows the reason behind “TV Santa Claus”‘ August delivery run.

Ever since the remains of “Homo Florensis”, an extinct species of unusually short humans, were discovered on Flores Island, in eastern Indonesia, scientists have been fascinated with this patch of land, which apparently has the power to somehow make mammals shorter and smaller.

It all began in 2004, when the remains of a human who would have been about 1.1 m in height were discovered at Liang Bua cave. Partial skeletons of nine other individuals were subsequently unearthed and analysis showed that they were part of a yet unknown species of the “Homo” genus named Homo Florensis. It’s estimated that they lived on Flores Island roughly 190,000 to 50,000 years ago. With an average height of just 1.1 meters, they were shorter than modern pygmies which earned them the nickname of ‘real-life hobbits’. Scientists believed they were the ancestors of the pygmies currently living on Flores Island, which made perfect sense, only it turns out that the two have nothing in common. If anything, both species had been independently “shrunk” by the island itself.

Between 2016 and 2018 a number of US and Canadian diplomats working at an embassy in Havana, Cuba, reported symptoms like headaches, nausea and memory loss after hearing mysterious noises. The phenomenon became known as the “Cuban Sonic Attacks”, but Havana authorities have so far denied any wrongdoing. However, a recent study suggests something did affect the diplomats, as dozens of them showed structural changes to their brains, such as a 5 percent shrinkage.

Published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the disturbing study analyzed advanced MRI scans of the brains of 40 diplomats that reported strange symptoms while being stationed in Havana, and compared them to those of 48 healthy people with similar ages and ethnic backgrounds. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that the whole white matter volume -areas of the brain central nervous system that affects learning – of the affected diplomats was roughly five percent smaller than that of healthy individuals. Authors added that connectivity differences in the brain’s auditory and visuospatial areas were also noticed between diplomats and control participants.

The CIA headquarters in Langley is home to lost of mysteries, but one in particular has captured the attention of professional code breakers and puzzle enthusiasts for the last three decades.

Kryptos, a coded sculpture created by American artist Jim Sanborn has remained unsolved ever since it was originally installed at the CIA headquarters in November of 1990. The agency’s code breakers as well as other professional puzzle solvers around the world have been struggling to unravel the secrets of the 1,800 characters carved into the 12-foot block of copper, and although they’ve succeeded in cracking three of the coded messages created by Sanborn, the fourth and final one remains unsolved. Experts have tried every technique in the book, transposition, binary, polyalphabetic substitution, even Morse code, but so far no one has been able to decipher the 97-character-long fourth part of the Kryptos Sculpture.

Plougastel, a small village in France’s Brittany region, is offering a prize of €2,000 ($2,250) to whoever can decipher a 230-year-old inscription carved into a nearby rock-slab.

Discovered just a few years ago, the mysterious rock is located in a cove accessible only at low tide. It features 20 lines of writing in a “language” that so far no one has been able to crack, two years – 1786 and 1787 – as well as carved images of a ship with sails and rudder, and a sacred heart. Local academics have been struggling to decipher the centuries-old images for some time now, but so far all they’ve come up with is theories. Some believe that the writing may be in old Breton or Basque, while others think that whoever carved it into the rock slab may have been semi-illiterate.

Dozens of shoppers at a Lidl supermarket in Gloucestershire, UK, recently reported mysterious anomalies with their car alarms and central locking systems which left them unable to leave the parking lot.

There’s something fishy going on in the parking lot of a Lidl supermarket in Kingswood, a suburb on the eastern side of Bristol City, but nobody knows what’s causing it. Last month several articles in the media reported cases of shoppers being unable to lock and unlock their cars or disable their alarm systems, and dozens of other people shared similar experiences in the comments section and on social media. At first, most of the “victims” of this bizarre phenomenon though the batteries of their car alarm keys had died, but the symptoms persisted even after changing the batteries. Some think it might have something to do with the Internet-based traffic cameras installed in the car park, which may be blocking systems, but the supermarket chain claims that’s very unlikely.

A Lidl spokesperson told The Mirror that the internet-based cameras don’t transmit a signal that could interfere with that of an alarm key, but admitted that they have no idea what’s causing so many of them to malfunction in this particular location.

Marine biologists in Brazil were stunned to discover the body of a young humpback whale on a remote island in the Amazon jungle, at a time of the year when it should have migrated 4,000 miles away, to Antarctica.

The whale’s body was found by members of the conservation group Bicho D’Água, after they spotted vultures circling a mangrove on Marajo Island, a large, forested island in northern Brazil. The marine mammal, approximately 26-feet-long, was lodged in thick shrubs and brush, about 50 feet from the shore. A team from the region’s Municipal Secretariat of Health, Sanitation, and Environment inspected the carcass and reported that it did not appear to have any visible injuries, so until officials conduct a necropsy, the cause of death remains a mystery. At this time, the two main theories are that a powerful tide launched the whale inland, or that it died at sea and was carried onto land by people.

A Polish mountain climber who recently scaled his country’s highest peak was surprised to find a domestic cat waiting for him at the very top.

Wojciech Jabczynski couldn’t believe his eyes when he reached the top of the 2,500-meter-high Rysy mountain and spotted a ginger cat nonchalantly licking its paws. No one knows exactly how the feline got to the mountain top, or why, but Jabczynski suspects it may have climbed up from a small tourist hut under the peak. Surprised by its presence there, the experienced climber took out his phone and took some pictures and recorded a video, just to make sure people believed him when he told the story.

Armyansk, a city on the Russian-occupied Crimea Peninsula, has been left without any kind of birds after a mysterious chemical incident at the nearby Crimean Titan plant.

On August 23 – 24, an unknown substance spewed into the atmosphere, covering everything in a rust-like plaque and emanating a foul odor. Social media was buzzing with reports and photos of houses, cars and even plants covered in the mysterious substance, but occupation authorities ignored them for several days. At first, people started noticing that, apart from the occasional crow, there were no more birds in Armyansk, but then things got progressively worse. More and more residents of the Crimean city began experiencing breathing problems, but local authorities and the media completely ignored them.

Australian food scientists are scratching their heads about an orange that turned bright purple just hours after being sliced open. The bizarrely-colored fruit has been collected as forensic evidence but so far no one can explain what caused the coloring.

The mysterious orange was purchased last week by Neti Moffitt, a resident of Brisbane, from a fruit and vegetable market. She planned to use it as a snack for her two-year-old son and claims that the fruit looked and smelled normal. It was only after leaving a piece of it out overnight that she noticed the bright purple coloring spreading on the orange pulp. After searching online for answers, Moffitt stumbled on a 2015 article that mentioned a similar case, where someone had bought an orange from a fruit market only to see it turn purple hours after being cut.

What was once an ordinary 3-bedroom home in the suburbs of western Sydney has now gained a reputation as a “miracle house”. Ash and oil leak from its walls in such a way that is reportedly “beyond science”. The homeowners, George and Lina Tannous, believe that the allegedly unexplainable phenomena are a sign from God and that they have also granted the house miraculous healing properties.

According to the pair, their house has the amazing ability to help other couples become pregnant, even in cases where they have received medical confirmation that pregnancy would be impossible. There is even one instance of the house reportedly curing a woman’s cancer.

Indonesian media has been buzzing with news of a woman declared missing over one and a half years ago, after being swept away by a large wave, who was allegedly found alive three days ago,on the same beach that she disappeared from, and wearing the exact same clothes she was wearing on the day of her disappearance.

52-year-old Nining Sunarsih was on vacation in Sukabumi, West Java, when she was swept away by a strong wave on Citepus Beach, and carried out to sea by strong currents. At the time, eyewitnesses said they heard the woman screaming and waving her hands for help, but they were too scared to go in after her. Search and rescue operations didn’t find any sign of her, until a week after the tragic disappearance, when a dead body was discovered in the area. They asked Nining’s family to come and identify the body, and even though it was reportedly in very bad condition, her relatives were convinced that it wasn’t her, because it lacked a distinctive birthmark on the abdomen, and the fingernails looked very different.

To the casual observer, the thousands of bent trees scattered throughout the North American continent look like mere freaks of nature, deformed by the elements of disease, but a more careful analysis reveals that these trees bend sharply into right angles, parallel the earth, which suggests that they were intentionally shaped long ago, for an unknown purpose.

Bent, splintered or otherwise deformed trees are not exactly uncommon, but the so called “trail trees” still growing in many US states have a very specific shape. At about four or five feet above the ground, their trunks bend sharply forming right angles, parallel the earth, and then sharply bend upwards once again. Various accidents can cause this shape to occur naturally, but another distinctive trait of these mysterious trees is that they feature no scars in their bent areas. While scientists have yet to agree that this is proof that the trees were purposely bent by humans centuries ago, there are many who believe that the bent trees were once used as markers by hunters and gatherers to help them find their way around the vast wilderness.

O’Neal Mahmoud, a 3-year-old from an Arabic-speaking Druze family in the Golan Heights, Israel, has amazed doctors with his ability to speak English with a British accent without ever having been exposed to the foreign language.

Named after legendary basketball player Shaquille O’Neal, O’Neal Mahmoud didn’t speak at all until he was 2-years-old. Then he started making these unintelligible noises, and at one point started speaking fluent English and using phrases like “my dear” and “oh my goodness”, which are hardly ever used in his home village, near the Druze town of Majdal Shams, in northern Israel. Stranger still is the fact that O’Neal doesn’t actually know the Arabic equivalents of the English words he speaks. A speech therapist and clinical linguist who examined the toddler concluded that his level of English was that of a three-year-old who grew up in an English-speaking family, while his level of Arabic – his native language – was far below that.

A Labrador in the Argentinian city of General Roca has become a local attraction and an online sensation for a very peculiar reason – he spent at least three days staring at the blue wall of a bus station and no one can explain why.

The dog, named Chicho by social media users who didn’t know his real name, spends most of his time at a blue bus stop in the Stefenelli neighborhood of General Roca. Whether he is standing on all fours or sitting, he keeps his eyes glued to the blue wall of the station, as if paying attention to something or someone that nobody else can see. In a video that has been doing the rounds on Latino social media, people are trying to distract Chicho or drive him away from the wall, but he keeps wagging his tail and staring at it. So far, no one has been able to explain why.